


That Put Out the Fire, That Burnt the Stick

by nogoaway



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Homosexuality, Judaism, M/M, War, canon-typical political incorrectness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-24 12:56:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16640552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nogoaway/pseuds/nogoaway
Summary: In Oceanside, he dreams he is in the desert spilling out drops of wine for blood, boils, frogs and locusts. He wonders how many of the men they killed were first or only sons.





	That Put Out the Fire, That Burnt the Stick

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. This is fan fiction about a TV show, not real people.  
> 2\. Brad is a worse Jew even than I am (a feat), which is why it's not "G-d".  
> 3\. Title is from [Chad Gadya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Gadya)  
> 4\. [The Four Questions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_Nishtana)

For as long as Brad has been alive, his family has used the same Haggadah. There are six copies, enough for the California Colberts and one guest. They were published and printed in 1964. The cover is a photograph of a seder table that was once glossy, and the ink of the photo is faded into that desaturated purple that all magazines of the vintage eventually attain. Not a single copy is in good condition. No matter which one he finds at his place, there are pages loose, wine stains, one or two or eight year-old matzah crumbs wedged into the staples that crunch when he presses the binding flat to squint at the tiny vowels. There are no transliterations, just English and Hebrew flowing off in opposite directions, the mirrored inverse of each other. Sometimes whole leaves are missing.

What is never missing is the extra page, a photocopy cut carefully from printer paper by his mother's steady hand. It is always tucked into the same spot, between the hand washing and the _motzi matzah_. The font is different from the rest of the book. He doesn't remember exactly when it showed up, but he was young, so it must have been the early eighties. His mother has always been ahead of the curve.

For as long as Brad can remember, there has been an orange on the seder plate at his parent's house, and that photocopy explaining why. His mother always reads the little blurb about Susannah Heschel the feminist, how she started putting an orange on her seder plate to honor gay and lesbian Jews. She always ends it with a line that's not in the print, “and in this family we also lay out the orange in remembrance of Aunt Rachel.”

It's so rote, like every other part of the service (which is mostly spent counting down the paragraphs until they get to eat, anyway) that Brad doesn't make the connection until he's a teenager. He just assumes that his great Aunt Rachel must have really liked oranges.

 

* * *

At military school Brad gets assigned two types of story to read: war narratives and survival narratives. Sometimes they overlap. The greatest books ever written, in Brad's informed adolescent opinion, are _Slaughterhouse 5_ , _The Call of the Wild_ , _Hatchet_ , and _The Red Badge of Courage_.

(Many books and many years later, at a trailhead near Big Sur, he will admit to a despairing Classics major that he never made it all the way through the Iliad.)

At a public high school with a reading list carefully curated by the tender-hearted, weak-kneed pinko dicksucks that comprise the State of California's education department, his sisters are assigned three types of stories to read: Holocaust narratives, Jim Crow South narratives, and gay coming-of-age narratives. When he's home for the summer and has nothing to occupy him but Sharon's bookshelf, he consumes _Annie on My Mind_ , _Brideshead Revisited_ , and _A Separate Peace_. Each is like visiting an alien planet. He doesn't find anything of himself in them, these stories about people trying to fit.

 

* * *

Brad is not a normal, civilized person struggling to stay that way. He knows he doesn't fit. At the nice liberal reform Hebrew School his parents send them to on weekends, he can't hope to blend in. Surrounded by dark, bent heads mouthing familiar rapturous words, he is too tall, too blond, too blood-thirsty. The nice liberal reform Rabbi informs Brad's parents that although Brad is welcome even as an atheist, he has to stop acting out in class.

At a summer camp sponsored by the JCC, he helps Hannah down out of the bus with one hand and holds his place in _All Quiet On The Western Front_ with the other. The counselor checking them in refuses to let him onto the premises until he can get Brad's mother on the phone and confirm that he is, in fact, the Bradley Colbert enrolled alongside his two sisters.

They go to that camp for five consecutive summers, Hannah and Sharon sequestered in the girl's cabins and Brad condemned to sleeping alongside fourteen cliquey private school boys who get legitimately exited about singing campfire songs in Yiddish and tying knots. The only thing he can stand about it is the obstacle course in the woods. He high crawls between tires in the sunset and imagines he's being shelled.

Suburban California is not the world he's made for. He knows this as surely as he knows that he will get out. He just has to wait.

 

* * *

At military school, Brad doesn't think he knows a single guy who hasn't jerked off in front of someone else, or experimented in more direct ways. A lot of the smaller guys are experimented _on_. No one talks about it. It doesn't mean anything. It's just something that happens in that kind of place: prison rules.

In the 1990s, on television, suddenly there are gays everywhere. They are loud. They are obvious. They always “always knew”.

This is how Brad knows he's not. He's never “always known” anything, except that he was going to be a Marine.

 

* * *

The spring he turns nineteen, Allie sends him a Dear John letter two weeks before Pesach. It's all about Brad and how he seems: he doesn't seem invested. He seems to care more about his friends on base than her. He seems like he doesn't want the same things Allie wants. He seems unenthusiastic when they are together, and he seems happier when they are apart.

What she doesn't say is that Brad only seems these things in comparison to Daniel. If it weren't for someone else, Allie and Brad would have been fine the same way they were always fine.

It's the first seder without her since he was thirteen. He puts the extra haggadah back into the cabinet. After six years, he's the youngest one at the table again. His family exchanges awkward glances as he reads the four questions.

 

* * *

His parents never ask him outright. He doesn't even realize that they're hinting. Is Brad seeing _anyone_? Has Brad met _someone_ new?

“You know I'll love you no matter what,” his mother says when he's on leave after Afghanistan, not trying very hard to adjust. He thinks she means, _even though you've killed people_.

 

* * *

Brad doesn't date. Occasionally, Brad visits experienced professionals. He doesn't waste his time with young whores who just moan and writhe on top of him with their tits out like that's sufficient to get him up. He likes Delilah back in Oceanside, and Kitty in Darwin. They're both at least 40 and have him down to a science.

Jacking off is a mechanical task, like shitting or brushing his teeth. He concentrates on what he needs to in order to get it done, faceless fucking bodies and indistinct sounds, and doesn't think about it afterward.

Brad has one love in his life, and everything else is in service of it.

 

* * *

The only thing that keeps OIF from being a completely irredeemable clusterfuck is 6'2” and as young as he looks, and he still leaves them, in the end.

In the meantime, Brad uses Fick's expressions, posture, and tone of voice as a barometer to determine how fucked they are about to be by command at any given moment. Fick's tight mouth, his rapid-fire plosives; these are variables Brad keeps track of like hours of daylight, .50 rounds, the sleep and nutrition needs of his team. In Iraq, he dreams he is in Iraq, and he dreams of mortar calculations, AAA batteries, and Fick's face with the same regularity.

It's late March when they leave the wire behind and roll into the goatfuck to end all goatfucks. He doesn't think about Pesach because it's 103 degrees, and the only thing _that_ reminds him of is how Trombley needs more encouragement to hydrate.

 

* * *

Later (in Oceanside, in Plymouth, in Oceanside again, on his deathbed if he's lucky), he'll remember how Fick looked in the tall grass outside of Nasiriyah, back straight and face turned towards the mortars, unflinching. Despite the wrong camouflage, Fick fits there. A part of the landscape.

After RCT-1 schwacks the hamlet near Ar Rifa, obliterating women and children and goats and ovens in a rain of fire worthy of God Himself, Fick orders Brad to snap to. Brad observes the flat line of his boyish mouth, the tightness of his jaw, the smooth tendons of his neck. Underneath his anger and disbelief, his chest and stomach tighten like there's a wire strung through him that Fick has pulled taut.

Poke catches his eye over the hood of the victor they're all leaning against. Brad remembers that he has a daughter. As Fick strides away, Poke says, "I like him, too, dawg. But you gotta remember, he's not your friend."

 

* * *

 

Their exodus is so easy, an airplane over the Pacific and cheering faces when they arrive. His mother meets him in the parking lot outside Pendleton. She doesn't cheer and never has, just clings to his waist with relief.

In Oceanside, he dreams he is in the desert spilling out drops of wine for blood, boils, frogs and locusts. He wonders how many of the men they killed were first or only sons.

 

* * *

In September, Mike Wynn's backyard is cold and wet and littered with red solo cups and beer bottles. Brad stalks through the moonlight collecting them onto his fingers until he clinks and rattles like Edward Scissorhands and thinks about going home to his sublet. He's just drunk enough that driving seems like a reasonable idea.

Movement in the scrub oak to his three catches his eye and he stills, listening. Fick smiles at him knowingly as he emerges. In low light the insignia on his sweatshirt is unreadable-- some University too good for Brad. Fick somehow looks bigger, more imposing in civvies than he did hauling an M4 and a flak vest and the fate of twenty-two men through an inhospitable landscape.

He holds open the garbage bag he's carrying, and Brad lowers his cargo in delicately on top of the other recyclables.

“Still cleaning up after drunkards, sir? You must miss infantry command already.”

Fick smiles at him, brilliant. He looks so happy to finally be done with it. “I can't let you police call Mike's yard on your own. It's a dangerous neighborhood.”

Brad snorts. Yeah, he'd heard there was a cabal of trained killers here earlier, infiltrating the land of kiddie pools and yoga studios in their farewell ceremony for a fellow warrior. Like a Viking funeral; set the old Fick on fire and cast him into the sea.

They comb the lawn in companionable silence until they're at the edge of Mike's property where the grass fades into woods. Maybe Brad should just kip here, on the leaves. He's slept in worse places.

When he mentions this to Fick, Fick laughs, and Brad's stomach goes suddenly hot, like he's swallowed 100-proof. His gut aches pleasantly, and that internal wire pulls tight like a stitch or a scab.

Fick's fingers touch Brad's bicep, the cool skin beneath his sleeve. Brad prickles with goosebumps. He wonders if he's getting sick. Fick is too close to him to be friendly. He is whispering, quieter than the crickets. “Do you need a ride home, Brad?”

Heat and nausea roll through him, hard enough to shake his teeth in his skull. His heart pounds, his hands and feet tingle. He realizes that it's terror.

“What the fuck?” he rasps, and Fick is gone instantly, the space between them filling with cold air like a house with the door left open in Spring, and growing, growing, until Brad's alone in the trees watching the lights in Mike's house go out one by one.

 

* * *

 In October he spends a grand total of six minutes with Delilah against a wall in her usual pay-by-the-hour, and the remaining fifty-four splitting a 40 of King Cobra he picked up at a Citgo on the way.

“I always said that one of these days you're gonna come back so fucked up all you want to do is drink and talk,” Delilah laughs. She has the wheezy rumble of a dedicated smoker and the bitter cynicism of a displaced New Yorker. “I thought you'd have to lose your dick first, though.”

Delilah's okay. Brad's learned that he only really understands two kinds of people: infantrymen and whores.

“If I lost my dick, Delilah, I'd tell them to let me die there.”

“You sure about, that, honey?” She wheedles, trailing tan fingers over his thigh. “Not making much use of it.”

“I didn't separate from my hard-earned combat bonus to listen to this shit,” Brad gripes automatically. He's feeling very mellow. “I risk my life defending your freedom to sell your tired, bacteria-ridden cunt to every emotionally-disabled man-child in California who can't pick up at a bar. You should be nicer to me.”

“You know, you're handsome and smart. You could do the real thing all right.”

Brad snorts and pulls deeply on the bottle. “Delilah, there is not a nice Jewish girl in all the land brave enough to face my mother.”

“I don't think that's your problem, honey.”

“Mortgages and summer camp and golden retrievers-- I don't need that kind of bullshit. Would _you_ shack up with a civilian?”

Delilah hums contemplatively, fiddles with the cap of the 40 between her fake nails. “You make it sound like it's a choice. This or that. But some people belong to one world, and not the other.”

“Yeah,” Brad says. “That's my exact fucking point.”

 

* * *

“One toothless, cow-tipping, squirrel-pie-fucking boot in the battalion gets accused of harassment and we're all subject to fifteen hours of sensitivity Powerpoints instead of learning to operate the means of modern warfare.” Brad leans back on his stool and spits on the floor. It's been a hell of a week, and given the state of the place, a little saliva can only make it cleaner. “Meanwhile, our illustrious leader is funding weekday abortions for all the elitist co-eds he's romancing in that den of liberal perversity they call the Ivy League. Tip of the spear, gents. Don't you feel like America's 911?”

The silence is total, and awkward.

“You didn't hear?” Christenson stares at him wide-eyed over his glass, like it's completely unfeasible that he would have intel Brad doesn't. “The LT, uh. He came out, man. He's gay.”

“Bullshit,” Brad says, but Ray is already nodding gravely into his IPA.

“I knew there was a reason I liked him,” Poke opines “He's the one kind of white man who knows the bitter lash of oppression.”

“Right,” Brad says. “The _one_ kind.”

“Take it easy, you know I'm down with the Chosen People.”

“Brad's not really Jewish,” Ray bitches. “His real mom was probably some basic whiskey-tango white bitch like the rest of us. He's got John Deere genes, I can sense it.”

“Iceman does posses the spirit of a true colonizer,” Poke allows. “But we all assimilate eventually. That's why the white man is so insidious, dawg. He gets inside your head and stays there until you start acting white, too.”

Brad insults them both floridly in Yiddish. It's a wonderful language, with at least five words for 'penis'. Those are most of the words he knows.

“Fuck though homes, can you imagine being gay in the Corps?” Ray simply talks over him, which is the only evidence that he's smashed. “It's gotta be like a diabetic working in a candy shop. All that temptation all day long. No wonder he left, now he can suck all the cock he wants.”

“Shut up, Ray,” Brad snaps. “The LT doesn't suck cock. He got us home alive precisely because he refused to suck command's cock. Show the man some fucking respect.”

Ray wiggles his tongue in the inside of his cheek and makes a jerking motion with his hand. “Bradley, I would show that man all _kinds_ of respect, fucking and otherwise.”

“He'd probably like that,” Christenson offers. “Since he's gay.”

“'It's not gay if you have boot bands on',” Poke recites, and laughs. “You all are fucked up. There is not enough money in the world to get me within two feet of another man's dick, respect or no.”

“And that's why you'll never own a successful business, Sergeant. Your people lack ambition. Stick to running a landscaping company out of your pickup and leave higher aspirations to the rest of us. Personally, I'm going to open a chain of gay bars. Piss-themed, cause that's in right now.”

“Fuck, I'm never going back to school if it turns you gay,” Lilley says. “That's gotta be what happened, right? LT got reamed by the homosexual agenda at Harvard and now he fucks dudes and votes Democrat.”

Q-Tip, who has been conspicuously silent, steps in. “That's not how it works, homes. Brother was always like that, he just didn't tell nobody.”

 

* * *

England reminds him more of summer camp than it does of Pendleton. He doesn't know why he feels so lonely, because these men are his brothers, too.

It rains too frequently and any snow that manages to fall becomes gray slush by the morning. He finds himself drafting emails to Fick's Harvard address to commiserate about the weather. He never gets past the first few lines, doesn't know how to say hello anymore without the simple protocols of radio or rank between them. The university firewall would probably bounce him anyway, because no one with a .edu would want mail from a .mil.

On a frigid morning in December, tucked into a corner of the least offensive coffee shop he can find in Plymouth, the only one not continually barraging him with Christmas music, he sends this:

_Sir:_

_Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a decent_ _enchilada_ _in this place?_

He doesn't check his inbox for two weeks, because they are in the mountains. When he gets around to it, Fick's reply is many days old. He tells Brad about the weather (punishing), his peers (aggressively naive), his classes (too easy), the book he's writing (too difficult). He wishes Brad a Happy Hannukah. He signs it

_Sincerely,_

_Nate._

 

* * *

Brad doesn't know why he writes back. He doesn't know why he wrote in the first place. But Fick and the written word is easy, and it's a way to spend his free time. He thinks up dozens of letters to Fick for every one that he sends. Sometimes on duty he composes responses to Fick in his head as he staffs a desk, or hauls ammo cans, or watches a road. Sometimes he sings Clapton under his breath. Sometimes he recites the Shema and chants the five blessings for Haftarah, which he memorized at thirteen and has never been able to replace with more useful information. One of the guys hears him and after that the joke is that the Iceman can summon demons.

Just like home, much of his day is spent waiting for people who make twice what he does to arrive at training exercises they arranged. He leans against a boulder near a Dartmoor firing range at o-dark-thirty, icy hands tucked into his armpits, and thinks, ' _I'm reading Caesar's 'Gallic Wars'. Is that the kind of thing they had you read in college, sir? Why would you read it and decide to go to war? You would have already known that it's one goatfuck after another, and then officers lying about how goatfucked it is. I prefer Shakespeare's Caesar to the real one, but then again he's dead for half the play. Also, someone should tell Poke that imperialism is as old as time and it wasn't always white people. Why did you join the Marines, sir? You already knew, didn't you? Didn't you always know?'_

 

* * *

He turns thirty the year Israel turns fifty-six. His family offers to Skype him into Pesach, but Brad is eight hours ahead and it won't be sunset for one of them. He is fighting with Fick over email about BDS, the influence of the diaspora on American foreign policy, and Resolution 1544. In between Fick's densely cited refutations of Brad's geopolitical arguments are crumbs that Brad lingers over with too much sentimentality: how daffodils are appearing along the Common, what's on tap at Fick's favorite student bar and how overpriced coffee is, the view from his running route along the Charles. Reading it makes him homesick, which is nonsensical. He's never been to Boston, and what he has seen of the East Coast is unimpressive.

Fick is a civilian now, so Brad can't give him details about training exercises. Instead he tells him about:

  * The various meat jellies, meat puddings, and blood-and-organ-based casseroles he's been tricked into consuming, and how he thinks Q-Tip would appreciate English cuisine.



(Nate tells him about the time he tried head cheese from an Italian grocer in the North End.)

  * The best pair of socks Brad's ever worn in his life. A corporal from Leeds introduced him to them. They are hand-made in Vermont out of wool and presumably the pubic hair of Holy Virgins, because they run 40 pounds a pair. Brad can ruck over twenty miles a day in shin-deep mud and the socks show no signs of distress.



(Nate already knows about Darn Toughs and offers to get Brad some that are on sale.)

  * Re-reading _Slaughterhouse 5_ and _White Fang_ in single sittings at the used bookstore he's been occupying on his 48s.



(He sends that one ten days before they deploy, and hasn't heard back from Nate by the time his bags are packed, so he calls him from the shitter of the pub.)

Nate answers on the second ring. “Hello?”

“Sir,” Brad says, because Fick's voice makes everything make sense again, even the fancily-packaged ethanol he's been mainlining. _Loud and clear, two-one, send traffic._

“Brad?” Fick sounds alarmed. Brad hears shuffling, slamming, a sudden shift in ambient noise. “Are you all right?”

“Fuck, you're in class.” He remembers Nate mentioning it-- exam season. Fuck.

“Library. It's fine, Brad. What's going on?”

“Nothing. Thought you might want to bestow more ignorant goy opinions upon me about Gaza and the birthright of my people since time immemorial.” He says all of this a touch too slowly, afraid he'll slur.

“You've never called me.” Fick simply ignores Brad's needling. “It's past two there. Are you at a bar?”

“I should,” Brad says. “We should talk more. We should talk when I get back.”

Nate's silence is overtaken by the hum and roar of his company outside the door of the Men's, football on the overhead screens, his own blood pounding too quickly behind his eyes.

Finally, Nate says, “You didn't tell me you were deploying. Helmand?”

“The graveyard of empires,” Brad confirms.

“What do you need?” Nate is all calm, earnest logistics. “Are you well-supplied? I can get personal items in bulk.”

Brad grins. “We're fine, sir. Even have enough maps. Satellites. Been looking at them all week.”

Nate's laugh is so foreign, so far away, but it feels like he's right here, right in Brad's ear, warm and immediate. Just a vehicle behind. “I take it you're pleased with command as well, or you would be regaling me with tales of their idiocy.”

“Are you implying that I have ever been less than enthusiastic about the honor, courage, and commitment of our commissioned brothers, who have voluntarily taken on the immense burden of private offices, cushy paychecks, and unrestrained authority over the enlisted man?”

“Not so much implying as stating outright.”

“In that case, sir, I'll say that I'm cautiously optimistic, since it won't be held against me.”

“Perish the thought.” Nate sounds bone-dry.

Brad is.... very much not dry. “Soused” is the word they use here. “It's smarter here, sir. Smaller, tighter. We have translators. They know they invest in Marines here. We're not disposable.”

“Sounds like it's everything you wanted. But I'm surprised to hear that Europe can lure you, of all people, away from our great nation so easily. Aren't you allergic to cosmopolitanism?”

“Not Europe,” Brad corrects. “The Corps of Royal Marines of Her Majesty's Naval Service. It's so civilized, sir. They even let gays serve. Almost like it's the twenty-first century.”

He doesn't know why he says it. He isn't planning to, and the moments after he does are torturous and dizzying. He starts to wonder if he said it at all. Maybe Fick is silent because Brad didn't say anything, and he's waiting for Brad to speak.

“I didn't realize that was a plus for you, Brad,” Nate says finally. He sounds absolutely normal. “But you know I'll always support you.”

Brad lets himself laugh. The relief is overwhelming. It was nothing. He said it, and nothing happened. “Fuck you, sir.”

“Try not to die, Brad,” is the last he hears of Nate Fick's voice for sixteen months.

 

* * *

Brad thinks that if he ever believed in God, combat would disabuse him of the notion very quickly. Not because of killing, or dying, but because of the pointless human suffering that prevails in the kind of shitholes Marines get sent to. Even before America started fucking these people up with heavy weaponry they were suffering. Not enough sanitation, not enough food, not enough education, not enough healthcare. Worms that get into your wounds and lay eggs. Flies that breed on your mouth and eyes as you sleep. Brad's been to places where rats chew on babies at night and corpses are burnt in the street. War is only one of the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse, and he's overkill. The world isn't made for people to be in it, especially not this part of the world. Maybe that's why monotheism started in a desert, he thinks. People wanted food so badly they had to make up stories about it falling from the sky.

The Torah got a lot right about this place. It's a land of blood and judgment.

The kids, though. They're like kids anywhere. That's the thing he can't stand: how the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.

 

* * *

The Helmand tour over-shot the end date of Brad's exchange contract, so they get rid of him immediately upon return. He calls his mother from Heathrow and Fick from Logan eight hours later.

It's late morning. He hasn't slept in thirty-two hours. A cab drops him off outside a colonial two-family with three bikes locked to the wooden porch rail. He pays with American bills fresh from the exchange, and then stands there on the uneven brick sidewalk, clutching his duffel and stunned into motionlessness by the riotous color of the trees that tower over everything-- red, yellow, orange. He waits, and waits. Full minutes of silence, but there's no mortars. A man walking a dog crosses the road to avoid passing him.

Fick doesn't exit the house. He comes up beside Brad carrying a crate of Sam Adams and a white plastic bag that smells overwhelmingly of teriyaki sauce. It takes Brad a double, then a triple take to recognize him. He's wearing a red beanie. His face is clean. He doesn't have deep circles under his eyes.

“Come on in,” he says.

* * *

Fick lives on the second floor. There are two pairs of men's go-fasters by the door, neatly huddled. Brad stares at them for too long, cover clutched in his hand, dread rising from his stomach for reasons he can't name. He should remove his boots. No, he should go. He can sweat it out in a hotel for 48 hours, or however long he'll allow himself, and then get on a plane and go home to his family. He shouldn't be here.

Fick watches him from the open-plan kitchen, beers in hand. “Do you just want to sleep?” he asks. “You look like shit.”

“Who lives here?”

“Me. My roommate.”

“You have a roommate.”

“I should have two. Rent is worse than California.” Fick has apparently made an executive decision, because he's flipping the caps off the beers. “But I think I'm allowed a little financial irresponsibility in my twenties. Sit down.” He indicates the sofa. It's an order.

Brad sits and takes the beer that's offered to him. When he finishes it, there's a second, and a third. Eventually Fick stands up, downs the last of his first beer, and says, “I should get to the library. You can sleep on the couch, or use my bed. Paul should be out all day, but please don't scare him if not.”

“Don't,” Brad says.

Nate sits back down, looks at him expectantly.

“I'm not squared away yet,” Brad admits. “I can't go home like this.”

It's happened before and he's generally fucked up for two days, three at the most. But usually he's not alone with it. Usually there's twenty-one other guys who are fucked up too, and Brad's far from the most fucked up one in the bunch.

“Your emails were pretty vague,” Nate says, offering to hear more details, or not.

“Nothing really bad.” Brad tips his head back, contemplates the flat, white ceiling. “We didn't lose anyone. But it's fucked up over there.”

“Bombs in the garden,” Nate sighs. “I know.”

“Yeah,” Brad says. “You do.”

 

* * *

Brad sleeps for thirteen hours and wakes to the smell of coffee. Nate is at the kitchen table with three books and a laptop open in front of him, his fingers holding too many places. Brad watches as he flips back and forth, cross-referencing.

“It's Yom Kippur,” Nate says, without looking up. “If you want, I can find you a service.”

“You're funny.” Brad pours himself a mug of unreasonably good coffee. He remembers that quip about financial irresponsibility. The mug Nate left out for him has an MIT crest on it. The roommate, maybe. “But I have nothing for which to atone.”

Brad sits down across from him. The window in the kitchen is cracked open, delivering brisk air and birdsong, the scent of the apple tree in the yard. Nate is barefoot in denim and cotton. His hair is still buzzed short, and he keeps track of holidays he doesn't celebrate. Brad thinks that he would like to stay here. If he can't be in the desert, he wants this all the time. He sips his coffee as Nate hunts for citations, gaze lingering on his mouth and hands, and waits, and waits, and the terror he felt in the darkness of Mike Wynn's backyard doesn't come.

“Did you always know you were gay?”

Nate is highlighting. His hand pauses for a fraction of a second, then continues, smooth down the line. Brad remembers holding the Torah pointer at thirteen, how the silver finger glided along the parchment. “More or less.”

“Did your family know?”

Nate's mouth quirks. “I didn't think they did, but apparently no one was surprised.”

He has more questions, but also enough time to ask them. He puts his mug down, and reaches across _The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations_ to touch Nate's left wrist. Nate's hand turns under his like a Pacific swell, holding him aloft.

 

* * *

In December they meet half-way, in Aspen. Nate bullies him onto one ski lift after another and laughs at Brad as he figures out where his weight needs to go in order to avoid wiping out. In snow gear Nate is bulky and functional again, but the long shadow he casts is bisected by ski poles, not a rifle barrel, and his face tells Brad nothing about command, and everything about Nate.

The cabin they're renting has two beds and icicles hanging from the roof, the doorway, the windowsills, any and every protrusion. The floor is always wet by the doorway, and cold, so they hasten to strip off their gear and get to higher ground. They're too big for the single bed next to the wood stove (Brad's, on account of his Southern Californian predisposition towards frostbite, or "delicate constitution" as Nate puts it), and their knees and shoulders knock together as they arrange themselves like siblings huddling up eagerly in front of the television at movie night. Brad is re-reading _The Call of the Wild_ again in honor of the snow; the hard corner of it digs into his thigh.

"You're wearing the socks I sent," Nate observes as he stretches and contorts to feed the stove without his feet touching the floor. His hair is still buzzed, and he's always clean-shaven. Brad knows it's not because he misses the Corps. Nate just is that way: minimal, intentional. Every bit of him is exactly what it is, and it killed him to be otherwise.

Brad nods over at Nate's laptop case, unopened since Brad snooped through it at the airport. "And you finally deigned to change your password to something not glaringly obvious to anyone with access to your census information."

Nate doesn't seem surprised or offended. "After two years of nagging, yes Brad, I did succumb to your sage advice. I have to use a mnemonic. I hope you're happy." He pushes the firebox closed with a piece of split wood.

"Thrilled beyond measure," Brad says. His back is cold, and his front feels like he's being roasted. He swivels, rotates himself like meat on a spit, trying to get evenly cooked until Nate says, "for fuck's sake, Brad", and employs tactical elbowing to get them both under the sheets and the comforter, laid out perfectly long and straight like a pair of chopsticks to keep from rolling off the edge. Jack London is banished to the cold floor.

Brad kisses a man for the first time at the age of thirty-one. He didn't know. He had no idea, until it happened.

 

* * *

 

In March, Nate comes to California. He is the youngest person at the table. He stumbles through the four questions without major upset ("I did manage to learn the _Greek_ alphabet, Brad"). It's like he's really asking, since he's never heard the answers before.


End file.
